Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday April 28, 2014 @01:54PM
from the end-of-the-line dept.

walterbyrd (182728) writes in with news about the end of the line for a Novell anti-trust claim against Microsoft. "The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday brought an end to Novell Inc's antitrust claims against Microsoft Corp that date back 20 years to the development of Windows 95 software. By declining to hear Novell's appeal, the court left intact a 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling from September 2013 in favor of Microsoft. The court of appeals unanimously affirmed the dismissal of Novell Inc's claims that Microsoft violated the Sherman Antitrust Act when it decided not to share its intellectual property while developing its Windows 95 operating system. Novell was seeking more than $3 billion."

Microsoft is a very old and established enormous corporation. Microsoft has behind it decades and literally hundreds of billions of dollars of lobbying efforts. Political donations to both established parties combined with the politicized nature in the selection of judges and you got yourself a favorable judicial system.

In Europe, it's mostly illegal for any business to directly donate to any political party. The parties are often funded directly from tax revenue in relation to their seats in the parliament

I don't think you understand what the word 'literally' means. You're off by at least three orders of magnitude. And "very old"??? Ford is an old company, US Steel is an old company, Barclays Bank is a very old company, Hudsons Bay Trading is a very old company. Microsoft barely makes it beyond "not new".

I think some of the issues had to do with the "appearance of corruption" - and even there the current court thinks millions of dollars in political contributions coupled with obvious enhanced access don't rise to the level of appearance of corruption. That leaves solid evidence of quid pro quo shennanigans, which will never be produceable. I.e., they've simply defined corruption away in order to rule the way their politics dictate. Except, of course, where their politics dictate otherwise (e.g. Bush v. G

Thomas is corrupt, a total money shill that votes the way he is told, and pushes the rest that way. His wife makes millions as a Koch lobbyist, yet he never recuses himself from cases that involve the people that pay his wife millions.Relevant example (there are many many more like this):http://crooksandliars.com/karo... [crooksandliars.com]

Scalia is also a corporate shill. He attends the Koch right-wing money events, and consistently votes the way the Koch brothers tell him to.http://www.politicususa.com/20... [politicususa.com]

Roberts, Alito, and kennedy are less corrupt, but do not hesitate to take tremendous pay for "speaking engagements" at the right wing events and vote consistently with Koch interests.http://www.politicususa.com/20... [politicususa.com]

I'm not surprised by this ruling at all. The current Supreme Court is very friendly towards businesses acting badly.

The Supreme Court is interested only in cases which offer the best opportunity to debate and decide substantial issues of federal constitutional law. The court receives around 10,000 petitions for a writ of certiorari each year. Seventy to eighty will go on to oral argument,

You can bet, that if the Microsoft antitrust findings weren't essentially dropped by the Bush justice department (after having been partially voided by a flaky accusation of judicial bias - for calling Bill Gates a liar in a magazine interview after he, you know, lied in court), they would've taken that one on appeal.

That phrase has quite a lot of bogus spin attached to it. They take something pretty mundane and turn it completely inside out. Based on the phrase as stated, you would think that Novell was expecting Microsoft to give up all of it's trade secrets when all it was really expecting was the details of a standard public interface.

This is just one of the many bad side effects of an overly expansive notion of "intellectual property" and of corporate privelege in general.

This is just one of the many bad side effects of an overly expansive notion of "intellectual property" and of corporate privelege in general.

You jumped to a pretty big conclusion there.

I think it's more applicable to say that this had more to do with Microsoft's ability to drag the case as long as possible and SCOTUS having little incentive to review a case that spans two decades with a dead product on one side and a dead corporation on the other.

I don't understand. If the interface was public, then by definition its details were shared. If there were details that were not shared, then those details were never part of the public interface contract, again by definition.

Is the problem that they didn't share the public interfaces with them with appropriate timing, or that they *thought* it should be a public interface when it wasn't, or something else I'm not getting?

From the end of the actual trial. [theinquirer.net] Apparently, WordPerfect for Windows 3.11 was not compatible with Windows 95. Novell was outraged that Microsoft did not retain whatever it was that WordPerfect required exactly how it was in 3.11. Novell asserted that Microsoft broke compatibility solely to give MSWord a headstart on Windows 95 systems, that changing unpublished system APIs had no other possible benefit for an operating system.

WordPerfect 5 and 6 were a mess. WP pre-Novell had long made a habit of creating its own printer drivers, stemming partly from the fact that they supported so many wildly disparate platforms (they started on AOS/VS... now go look that up and get off my lawn!) in the pre-GUI era that they needed an internally consistent set of interfaces to work with. Once Windows started providing things like printer management, even in the 3.11 era, they had a hard time switching over and tended to GPF all over the place

The Novel narrative is this:Microsoft shared the interface with Novel during the beta, encouraging it to rely on it. Then, a few months before release, and after WordPerfect was already dependent on those interfaces, Microsoft changed them and declined to share the new ones with Novel. When Windows 95 finally came out, MS did, in fact, publish those interfaces, but by then it was too late for Novel to ship WordPerfect with Windows 95's launch.

Had MS not shared those interfaces to begin with, Novel could have worked with an internal implementation.

Because, at the time, Word Perfect was a big player. This was before Microsoft began bundling in a 'free' copy of Office with Windows (i.e. OEM deals that made it nearly impossible to buy a PC that didn't 'come with' MSOffice), which is what ultimately killed WordPerfect. But making them late to the Windows 95 party didn't help either.

I'd make a snide comment about kids these days, but some 3- or 4-digit UID is going to just put me in my place.

That sad thing about the whole "public interface" issue is that the damage was irrevocably done long before Windows 95 was made. By 1995, Microsoft had so cemented their dominance that no remediation by the courts would have made a difference... and of course, the courts and the DoJ ended up letting them off with a slap on the wrist.

No, what they did was to dup Novell into developing a complex product using an API that they provided, but planned on changing at the 12th hour to defeat their competition out of the gate. Their goal was to make Novell look so bad in the eyes of the consumer that nobody would ever trust the product again. This is pure maliciousness and way over the top. Its one thing to simply not give information, its entirely another to mislead and make your competition do what you tell them, and then change it so that it is guaranteed not to work.

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Bottom line: If you shake hands with Bill Gates you had better count your fingers.

I'd agree with you about that behavior being malicious and "over the top"... but then there's the question of whether or not it was legal. That's really all the court system is supposed to determine. It might be a fine line, but ultimately, I think the courts did the right thing here.

If you volunteer information to a competitor and then it turns out the info you provided was bogus... it was still information you VOLUNTEERED. There would be a clear legal case here if Novell signed a deal to PAY for this

I don't know what group of idiots was managing Novell at that time, but they screwed that company up just about every way that they could. They owned the PC networking space for years, there was nothing on the market with the capabilities or stability of Netware 3.1x for years and a Novell Netware certification was a ticket to the big paycheck. The move from Netware 3 to Netware 4 was years late, a huge amount of work, a complete paradigm shift, horrendously expensive, extremely risky, and notoriously fla

I used AD before I used NDS, and remember an awful lot of head scratching while thinking "Why the hell did they do it this way?" Having used Windows first I also tend to do the same when trying to work on a Mac or Linux machine, a lot of it is just what one uses first.

NetWare had a lot going for it, it must have taken a lot of work to sabotage that much of a head start. There were several other companies in that same time frame where management insisted on maintaining revenue levels or not adjusting pri

Before AD, Microsoft started including the Exchange client with Windows, making it much easier to just use Exchange for email. And that required a Windows server. And once you have your first Windows server, well, it's just easier to go whole hog. All of which would be okay (i.e. legal), i guess, except the bit about bundling with Windows. But Windows' monopoly status hadn't been established yet.

As far as Mac's and Linux systems attaching to Windows shares. It took an antitrust action in the EU to guar

Actually you could attach Macs to an NT domain, it actually was a lot easier than plugging them into the Netware network IIRC. Of course that was when Apple still did all of their own OS work, rather than slap their GUI on someone else's kernel.

I'd agree with you about that behavior being malicious and "over the top"... but then there's the question of whether or not it was legal. That's really all the court system is supposed to determine. It might be a fine line, but ultimately, I think the courts did the right thing here.

If you volunteer information to a competitor and then it turns out the info you provided was bogus... it was still information you VOLUNTEERED. There would be a clear legal case here if Novell signed a deal to PAY for this

Novell is practically nothing in comparison to what it once was in terms of company size and market presence. Even if the SCOTUS had overturned the ruling completely and found 100% in Novell's favor, what could that have possibly changed at this time?

I am not sure it is fully about the company when it gets to that level, but society in general. They are sanctioning MS's action and it tells these companies they can do those things and just drag out the case long enough that it no longer matters, just because they have more money.

Who said anything about expecting one company to help another out? What I except is that when I am working with a company they are not going to actively stab me in the back.In this case MS told them what they APIs were, then pulled it out from under them at the last second, to intentionally sink their product. If they would not have not given them the APIs there would not have been an issue, as then MS would not have been working with them and they could have developed something else, however by working with them and then pulling the APIs they intentionally sabotaged the product. By itself that still would not have been an issue, except they intentionally planned that.

As for a monopoly, there certainly was in the desktop, and the current state, after losing the antitrust and having to change practices, is not proof that there was not at the time.

You can't conceivably argue I'm wrong, either, considering the current state of the market and Microsoft's much diminished power due to market changes.

Much diminished? The profits at Microsoft suggest otherwise. The lopsided distribution of platforms that code is written for does as well. The share of new PCs sold with windows on it may have diminished from 99% to 95% in the past 20 years; that is not reasonably "much diminished".

And I say this as a Linux user. I would love to say that far fewer PCs today are running Windows than were 20 years ago, but I know that is not true.

True, but when it comes to markets where Microsoft's monopoly couldn't help so much, phones and tablets, they aren't doing so well. Those markets show what happens when there's a more level playing field and Microsoft's market share is negligible in the mobile market. It might not stay that way, but they are currently way behind Apple, Google and others. That could not have happened in the PC world in the last 20 years.

Meanwhile Google hasn't paid more than $1 billion in taxes to France, and almost all tech firms have done the same thing, not paying taxes to the US, based on legal fictions and tax havens (a fancy term for a way they can make the middle class pay for their infrastructure and legal protections without paying even 1/3 the tax rate you do).

Corporate tax is nothing but double taxation on shareholders, employees and indirectly customers of that corporation. US has the highest corporate taxes in the developed world, and corporations have duty to their shareholders to minimize that burden in whatever legal way possible.

"double taxation" -- cry me a river. By this stupid accounting, I'm quintuple taxed and I'm just a poor working stiff if I'm lucky.

US has one of the lowest effective taxes on corporations. And many of the fortune 500 companies pay 5% or less. Now if you are a small startup - taxes might be high, but you're not paying attention to who runs things.

loopholes closed and the tax code simplified as the Republicans have been proposing for a long time

Do you seriously believe that? Look at who porks up the budget with exemptions for corporate farms, weapons companies and fossil fuel industries. Each side has its pet industries, the Repugs may be "proposing" to simplify the tax code, but talk is cheap. They're not any better than the Dems on the subject, and considerably less honest about it.

No, I want that separate entity not to be taxed, or at least be taxed at a much lower rate than it is now. Even Obama wants to lower the corporate tax rate (39% on average federal+state) but it's difficult when his base is too stupid to realize that that money is ultimately coming out of their pockets.

"his base is too stupid to realize that that money is ultimately coming out of their pockets" -- The only thing I can reply to such a moronic statement is to pretend I'm talking to anyone who did NOT make such a statement. Cost of business comes out of profits. The market decides prices. Over time, if all companies have to pay the same tax -- it's a wash.

If we don't tax a company, there is no revenue to pay for anything -- and I don't get a discount on the happy meal. If w

Sure, I'll agree that we shouldn't tax your corporation, as long as your corporation agrees not to use the roads, airports, electrical grid, network protocols, postal system, patent and copywrite offices, ports, and all the other things that taxes pay for. Since according to Romney "Corporations are people my friend" the corporation that makes a million dollar profit should pay the same level tax as an individual with a million dollar paycheck.

Corporate taxation is the most efficient form of taxation we have. On one side you have a ruthlessly efficient system that tries to pay as minimum as it can and on the other we have a system that has cataloged every tax payer & tax rules. There aren't a lot of moving parts. Both sides understand the ever changing & complex tax rules defined by a multi-sided chess game. It is a very good balance. You eventually end up with the corporate world paying for what is required in the social world.

In FDR's day, corporations paid around 35% of the tax burden -- now it's under 7% and dropping.

We can't "afford things any more for some reason" we hear from the media.

We are supposed to be "more competitive" by allowing H1B visas so we can import educated people to work. These same corporations pay less of the bill and we pay more for education -- and then compete with workers who get education from a socialist government.

The discussion that we "can't tax rich people and corporations otherwise they would l

And what is wrong with Hippies? They were right. Was Vietnam a good war? Is making love not better than war?

If the taxes just came from capital gains, then you eliminate stocks and companies become privately owned -- or they trade stock in other countries. There's no one solution. Economic activity where money is made is where you tax.

Or we could just stop paying banks to make loans -- and just pay all the people, which I think is the only viable solution for a future where most labor gets replaced by robots.

Novell owned the network File/Print market and pioneered the e-Directory (NDS) environment. Microsoft was playing catch-up the whole way.

The biggest problem with Novell was that you couldn't develop applications on the Netware platform. Microsoft offered ISVs the ability to develop software on the platform (Windows) on which it would run. When Novell purchased Unix, I thought that they would fully integrate NCP (Netware Core Protocol) into Unix. This would allow ISVs to develop software on the same platform on which their software would run. Had they done so, Microsoft would have lost the server wars and been relegated to the desktop.

But Novell didn't do the necessary integration, and the rest is history.

As I recall, Word Perfect was better than Microsoft Word in almost every respect. In fact, Word Perfect 5.0 is probably better in many ways than the current incarnation of Word. Sigh.

tl;dr version: Novell killed themselves and Microsoft moved into the vacuum created when Novell imploded. The resolution of this lawsuit just puts the cherry on top of the whole mess.

As I recall, Word Perfect was better than Microsoft Word in almost every respect. In fact, Word Perfect 5.0 is probably better in many ways than the current incarnation of Word. Sigh.

Word Perfect was the quintessential DOS-era, character based, word processor, ported to every operating system known to man, each with its own fiefdom within the company.

Its struggles with the transition to a graphical UI did not begin or end with Windows --- and it stumbled badly as the word processor began to evolve into the integrated office suite. Almost Perfect [wordplace.com]

But Novell didn't do the necessary integration, and the rest is history.

The back story on what went on when Novell bought Unix is quite interesting. And was probably what prompted the anti trust suit. Story was that there were a few calls made when Novell proposed this idea. If Novell expected to ever work with a Windows platform again, the Unix plan would have to be dropped. Unix would have to be sold (to a Microsoft front company) and Noorda would have to go.

In the final analysis, the suit was probably dropped because there was no intellectual property for Microsoft to share

But WordPerfect for Windows crashed non-stop. I was in the IT department at a college at the time and my previous roommate was the head PC lab tech. When the college told us we had to switch to WP for Windows officially, our jaws dropped, because everyone knew it was a buggy piece of crap.

But WordPerfect for Windows crashed non-stop. I was in the IT department at a college at the time and my previous roommate was the head PC lab tech. When the college told us we had to switch to WP for Windows officially, our jaws dropped, because everyone knew it was a buggy piece of crap.

Yes. Yes it was. WP4Win was, in fact, a crashing bug generator rather than a word processor. That was quite annoying, IIRC.

Just press ctrl+shift+F7 to print! Word was about 300 times more usable than Wordperfect, even the DOS versions nobody used. It just led in market share, & people didn't want to lose file compatibility.

Just press ctrl+shift+F7 to print! Word was about 300 times more usable than Wordperfect, even the DOS versions nobody used. It just led in market share, & people didn't want to lose file compatibility.

As someone who relied on a word processor for much of my work back in the early-mid 90's, I remember what a piece of crap MS Word was back then. Word Perfect (with the caveat that WP4win was crap), while it did have its peccadilloes, was far superior to MS Word. Feel free to disagree. However if you do, you will identify yourself as someone too young to remember or as someone who just wasn't paying attention. That is all.

Word For Mac 5.1 was the watershed line. That was the first truly great version of Word. It still wouldn't do all the stuff wordpenis would do (sorry, that's what we called it back when I supported it, because it was such a PITA) but it was by far the most usable word processor with any significant functionality. Wordperfect avoided going WYSIWYG for a long time, with the users awfully smug about it even well after Aldus Pagemaker proved that they were idiots.

What is wrong with saying a 2nd grader should know x before moving on to the 3rd grade, and a 3rd grader should know y, before moving to the 4th grade, and so on?

That's not really a good description of common core - it doesn't really do that. States can impose certain testing requirements on top of it, optionally, like Virginia's Standards of Learning (SOL), but you won't find any kind of requirement for "knowing" any objective facts in the Common Core.

But I wont, ill just ask you, what is wrong with the STANDARDS THEMSELVES? And please do not come up with the usual list of proven incorrect statements, such as teachers not being involved in the standards themselves.

That's a pretty big topic. The Common Core advocates seem to do a lot of marketing around their process for creating the standards, which includes taking a lot of existing standards (really bad ones), and pretending

What is wrong with saying a 2nd grader should know x before moving on to the 3rd grade, and a 3rd grader should know y, before moving to the 4th grade, and so on?

That's not really a good description of common core - it doesn't really do that. States can impose certain testing requirements on top of it, optionally, like Virginia's Standards of Learning (SOL), but you won't find any kind of requirement for "knowing" any objective facts in the Common Core.

So you are stating that is not what it does, and then as evidence state something that is part of the implementation, not the standards themselves, which was exactly the point I was making... The standards dictate what should be learned, not the how they learn and how they evaluate what they learn..

But I wont, ill just ask you, what is wrong with the STANDARDS THEMSELVES? And please do not come up with the usual list of proven incorrect statements, such as teachers not being involved in the standards themselves.

That's a pretty big topic. The Common Core advocates seem to do a lot of marketing around their process for creating the standards, which includes taking a lot of existing standards (really bad ones), and pretending they're worthy of expanding upon.

Which bad ones? Really hard to debate something if you are being vague possibly intentionally

I'll bring up a few of the basic issues and let you research more yourself.

Seventy-two CEOs hailing from corporations that usually like to stay out of the political fray, including Harley-Davidson, General Mills and Xerox, placed a full-page ad in the New York Times claiming that the curriculum will meet the “business community’s expectations.” That should tell you something right there: Are these companies interested in educating Americans to pursue their highest potential, or in creating a workforce beholden to the Corporate ladder?

correlation/causation issue with your statement. It does not really tell me anything on its own, however on the flip

Gee, sure are a lot of problems with the IMPLEMENTATION of these standards. I wonder why, if the standards are so fine, there are so many implementation problems.

Kind of like Communism, then, right? It's a perfect standard, and all of the murders, starvation, suffering and oppression are just implementation issues, right? Or, you know, like "spreading freedom in the Middle East" - the standard is just fine, but the IMPLEMENTATION was bad...

And if we had good public education in this country that would be a good plan. The problem is that by Federalizing the education system, we've only been spreading the pain... and most large inner cities still have third-world level education systems. Mississippi brags at least they aren't Louisiana and Louisiana still brags at least they aren't Mississippi. A majority of the public still believes in astrology. To listen to a lot of people the country's leading biochemist is Jenny McCarthy. And the ave

are you serious here? there is so much wrong with that statement its not even funny. first off, who are the people fighting for less taxes? the libertarians, tea party and a handful republicans. Who wants more taxes and higher taxes? the democrats.

If you want an actual solution, do away with the IRS and institute a fair or flat tax.

How is a flat tax fair? I used to think it was, but then realized how it actually hurts the poor even more than the current tax structure. I am all for lower taxes, but the problem is neither side wants to give up their toys to make it happen, they just want the other sides toys to go away.

im not saying one is better than the other just that the current way of doing this is bad. Id be for a consumption tax, where all FINISHED goods are taxed , supply line products (componants, unfinished wood etc would not be) and only charge a tax based on consumption. If you own a jet, you get taxed more than if you own a car. you dont own are car? you get taxed even less. Roll ALL taxes into the final sales and leave it at that.

The current tax structure is unsustainable, even to the pro tax and spend cr

I think the top brackets of wage earners face an undue burden imposed by the tax lawyer industry. I favor a flat tax (on both wages and capital gains) for the top 2.5% of income recipients at the same percentage rate as for those in the bracket just under that of the top 2.5%. The benefits of filing EZ really ought to be extended upwards.

People will say that without tax incentives, why would the "job creators" invest? But, the fact is, that everyone invests for the same reason, because it will turn a

It looks like you fell for the old Republicans versus Democrats ruse. Like a college football rivalry, you don't pay attention to the details but instead root for the home team while yelling disparaging remarks about the other team. Using this way of thinking, you believe every stereotype given and you are in danger of endorsing or discrediting an legislative initiative based solely is it was sponsored by a republican or a democrat.

Republicans love taxes just as much as democrats. The main difference betwe

It looks like you fell for the old Republicans versus Democrats ruse. Like a college football rivalry, you don't pay attention to the details but instead root for the home team while yelling disparaging remarks about the other team. Using this way of thinking, you believe every stereotype given and you are in danger of endorsing or discrediting an legislative initiative based solely is it was sponsored by a republican or a democrat.

Republicans love taxes just as much as democrats. The main difference between the two parties could be boiled down to who pays the taxes and what the government spends the money on.
Republicans prefer that the working class pay the majority of the taxes and government spend its money on national defense and corporate subsidies.This redistributes the money from the working class to the wealthy via government contracts and outright corporate welfare.

This isn't fair. Republicans in general want lower taxes because they want less burden on businesses to stimulate the economy (especially difficult on small businesses), and smaller federal government with less bloat (except on defense, point taken). The constitution calls for a federal government that provides for a common currency and a national defense, but shouldn't be much more than the mortar that supports the bricks which are the separate states. This is what the right wing wants. The left wing wa

Too bad Seattle is such an Republican enclave - you should try to get more Democrats to move there if you prefer their tax policies.

Not that the article doesn't use some pretty skewed statistics. It compares the tax burden with 4 exemptions to that of 1. Hey, guess what, if you're supporting 1 person on 6 figures you pay more taxes than if you're supporting 4. That's what progressive taxes are supposed to do.

I dunno whether you're being facetious - doesn't show in your post, but Seattle voted some 60+% for Dems election after election. They are essentially San Francisco, North. Republicans would be lucky to win votes for dog catcher in that city

Not just that, had Novell defined IPX in a way that would have allowed them to globally define & extend it, they could have been the de facto IANA and laid out the Internet assignments, instead of letting IPv4 mushroom until it became a pain. Also, had they created a Netware subset OS that could have been a desktop OS, they'd have done fine there as well. Instead, by switching to Linux, they just handed things over to Microsoft by putting a UNIX like OS into the equation.

Your IPX comments may have some merit but the idea of a desktop OS based on Netware is ludicrous. Netware was all about pumping packets with very high efficiency and stability. Because of this writing code for Netware was incredibly painful. There was no graphics capability...essentially there was nothing that wasn't about pushing packets, directory services, and networking. You would have been better off trying to write a desktop OS on a Cisco router.